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I was looking up the entry on the Methodenstreit, started poking around as you do, and discovered that the Wikipedia article about The Irrational Atheist describes a book that is barely recognizable to me. Among other things, neither Dinesh D’Souza nor his book had anything whatsoever to do with TIA; I purposefully refrained from reading What’s So Great About Christianity? or any similar books until after completing my own book. According to the Wikipedia rules, I’m not allowed to edit the entry myself, but perhaps some of you – either critics or fans, I don’t really care which so long as you’re capable of writing reasonably accurate summaries – might be willing to do so. I suppose it would be fitting to use either The End of Faith page or the one for The God Delusion as an acceptable model.

Among other things, I think the wikipage on the Euthyphro Dilemma would benefit from my critique of it, since it’s a more fundamental reduction of Socrates’s construction than the obvious arbitrary angle. I suggest that it serves as a good example in why it’s beneficial to read the argument you are looking to criticize in its entirety rather than simply accepting the common summation of it. (In case you haven’t read the appendices, the salient point is that Socrates had to cheat in order to construct the logic required to support the dilemma, and he even admits that he is doing so in the text. So, the so-called Euthyphro Dilemma is a non-starter in its original polytheistic terms, as well as being inapplicable to a monotheistic scenario.)

And don’t forget, according to those examples, any criticisms should be directed to me for responses to be added to the wikipage later. I think that’s an incredibly stupid Wikipedia policy, but we don’t make the rules, we just play by them. I think one mistake that conservatives and libertarians have made is to simply concede the online encyclopedic ground rather than fighting for it by utilizing the techniques that are explictly deemed permissible by the Wikipedia editors. For example, if Richard Dawkins is permitted to deny the public charge that he is an atheist fundamentalist, then every other target of public criticism has to be permitted similar denials… it’s interesting to note how the “criticism” sections of several wikipages contain more text that can be best described as “response to criticism” than they do actual criticism.

So, my response to the charge of Nazihood in the section entitled “Feminism, multiculturalism and equality” is as follows: I reject the label on what should be the embarrassingly obvious grounds that libertarians are damn near the cardinal opposite of Nazis.

1. It’s always surprising how much harder even the simplest fill-in-the-blanks are than what would otherwise appear to be difficult multiple choice questions. If questions three and six were reversed, I wonder if even one in ten of those who got it right on the multiple choice would have still done so. On a tangential note, a surprising number of people who scored 80 or more answered “Roosevelt” on question six. I didn’t expect to see that.

2. I was pleased to see how many people understood that Goldberg is making a connection between religion and fascism. I was somewhat less pleased to see how many people misunderstood the nature of that relationship. Just to be clear, fascism!=theocracy. An important element of fascism is the sacralization of secular politics, which is not at all the same thing as the politicization of a religion.

3. I found it very amusing that one quiz-taker who called himself JonahGoldbergIsALying$*%! or something to that effect only scored 30, which is one correct answer above the monkey score. As a rule, if you want to set yourself up as a critic – and especially if you’re going to assume a position of intellectual superiority – it tends to help to be able to demonstrate you possess at least some evidence of a clue regarding the subject. Of course, as we saw in the Blumenthal video, no one is so certain that he “knows his shit” as a complete ignoramus with a college degree.

NB: the correct answer to Question Six was not, in fact, “Benjamin Yahoo”.

4. A note to the superficially pedantic. Given that literally everyone who has read Liberal Fascism is perfectly aware that Fascism began with Benito Mussolini – the fact that this week’s reading is entitled “Mussolini: the Father of Fascism” would be your first clue – it is really not necessary to repeatedly point this out as if you are saying something meaningful when people are discussing pre-20th century governments and ideologies. In such context, “fascism” is understood to mean “proto-fascism”. Ideas seldom appear ex nihilo, so discussing the potential intellectual roots of an ideology is a perfectly reasonable thing to do for those who are interested in the matter.

5. I was impressed at how well people retained most of the more important facts in the introduction. It’s fallen back to 64 percent since Jonah posted the link at The Corner, but at one point, after several hundred people had taken the quiz, the AVERAGE score was 72 percent. That’s quite good, especially compared to the average 59 percent on the introduction to the last book. Give yourselves a self-congratulatory pat on your collective back, if that’s not too fascistic. You know, given the alliteration and supreme flexibility of the word, I’m a little surprised no budding young sci-fi author has adopted it as a euphemism. Doesn’t “motherfascist” sound less contrived and more expressive than the lame Battlestar Galactic “frack”?

Anyhow, I hope you enjoyed the quiz and invite you to take a crack at the one that will be posted next weekend. A ten-question quiz will be posted each Saturday, followed by a 25-question final covering the entire text at the end. But, the quizzes will stay up, so if you happen to be busy or fall behind in your reading, you can always take them later.

I suggest entering into the discussion of the various issues raised in the Introduction after taking the quiz. If you have any questions about Liberal Fascism, this would be the place to raise them. However, please note that because of the controversial nature of the subject, I will be moderating with a heavier hand than usual. The discussion should be focused on the range of issues covered in the Introduction; this is not intended as a forum for anyone to exhibit their own pet theories and/or psychological issues.

The reading for next week will be Chapter 1 – Mussolini: The Father of Fascism and the chapter quiz will be posted on Saturday.

It really is remarkable what junk “science” is based on evolutionary theory. It’s not just useless, its conclusions are reliably wrong:

Researchers at Oregon State University have made a fundamental new discovery about how birds breathe and have a lung capacity that allows for flight – and the finding means it’s unlikely that birds descended from any known theropod dinosaurs. The conclusions add to other evolving evidence that may finally force many paleontologists to reconsider their long-held belief that modern birds are the direct descendants of ancient, meat-eating dinosaurs, OSU researchers say….

The findings add to a growing body of evidence in the past two decades that challenge some of the most widely-held beliefs about animal evolution.

No doubt in twenty years, evolutionarians will be arguing that no scientist ever really believed that birds descended directly from dinosaurs and that you just don’t understand science if you think anyone ever did… despite the fact that half the biology textbooks in America will still say that they did.

We shall soon find out:

Congressman Ron Paul’s Federal Reserve Transparency Act, HR 1207, has reached and surpassed the level of 218 cosponsors in the House of Representatives, which means it is now cosponsored by a majority of the members. The 218th cosponsor was Dennis Kucinich (OH-10), and the bill has since received its 222nd cosponsor.

It’s a worthy effort, but I tend to suspect the Senate will torpedo the bill. There’s a reason the phrase “corrupt like a Senator” came about, after all. Last fall’s bailout made it eminently clear that the bankers are in charge, not the people.

I always find it amusing how Darwinists screech and point “CREATIONIST” like pod people encountering a real human whenever anyone expresses any doubts whatsoever about ND-TENS. And yet, the pro-Darwinian propagandists like Richard Dawkins are so astoundingly incompetent and their arguments are so obviously full of logical holes that it won’t be terribly long before it becomes obvious to most people that few genuinely intelligent individuals subscribe to a theory primarily held by maleducated dimwits who are either too indoctrinated or too dense to be capable of critically examining it.

I felt this guy’s critique was fairly pedestrian, but I did find it interesting to see how the process of coming to doubt Darwinian theory tends to be completely different than the way that evolutionary enthusiasts claim it happens. It’s seldom a question of attempting to avoid religious doubts – indeed, the very charge tends to imply a guilty plea to the metaphysical angle mentioned – it’s simply a question of shedding the mindless indoctrination that most of us acquired in school. It seems as if most of these pro-evolutionary bozos who are not professional biologists fail to realize that those of us who doubt ND-TENS had very much the same textbooks and schooling that they did.

I have passed over in silence some other sophistical arguments proposed by Darwinists, namely Darwin’s own discussion of variations within domesticated species, Haeckel’s embryoes, and Dawkins’ computer-generated insects, as too obviously irrelevant to need any comment beyond dismissal. Perhaps worthy of refutation, however, is the Darwinist “Just-So” story of “sexual selection.” This is an attempt to account for obviously unadaptive biological structures like the beautiful but cumbersome tail of the peacock. According to this theory, peahens like big beautiful tails, so the disadvantages of the tail in terms of the competition for survival is outweighed by its advantages for reproductive success. The whole notion is an exercise in begging the question. It assumes that peahens have already evolved unadaptive tastes. These unadaptive tastes cannot be explained by Darwinist mechanisms. I have not included these various bad Darwinist arguments in my accusations of fraud because they seem to me to be illogical rather than dishonest.

In a real science, if there is inadequate data, we say that we don’t know. For example, in the science in which I was trained, historical linguistics, there is very strong, solid evidence that Sanskrit is related to Greek and German, while there is a tiny amount of very weak evidence that Basque might possibly be related to Georgian. Therefore we assert that Sanskrit, Greek, and German are descendants of a hypothetical proto-Indo-European, while we say we don’t know the origins of Basque.

Darwinism does not have this respect for the evidence. Why not? I believe it does not because it is not a scientific theory. Its proponents frequently claim that their account must be accepted — regardless of any weaknesses in evidence or argument — because it is the only existing account which abides by materialist naturalism. This is the key to understanding the motivation for their bad faith and fraud. Darwinists are attempting to use the prestige of science to advance a metaphysical position, their commitment to materialist naturalism. Darwinism is the creation myth of naturalist materialists. That is why, I believe, they consistently call their critics “creationists,” regardless of their critics’ actual positions, and accuse them of being motivated out of a secret belief in the literal truth of Genesis. They are so concerned with Genesis because they are aggressively attempting to replace it with a rival myth, not because of some supposed threat to “Science” from “Religion.” In reality Darwinism’s proponents are the unreasoning dogmatists blinded by their faith in their own unexamined metaphysical assumptions, and its skeptics are the ones using reason and respecting the methods of science.

I don’t think evolution is a proper field of scientific study either, but then, I think that’s true of a lot of semi-sciences, including economics, history, psychology, and other soft sciences. As an aside, the deeper I delve into the history of economic theory, the more obvious it becomes that political economy is far more philosophy and ideology than science; ironically, the theoretical basis of “scientific” macroeconomics is little more than half-baked Freudian theory. To me, the more significant aspect of the issue is that evolution is largely scientifically irrelevant. Unless you’re messing around with bacteria or something else with extremely short generations, there’s little practical utility to the theory and even then you’re not dealing with anything that can reasonably described as natural selection given the inherently unnatural conditions imposed by the scientist.

Like Keynesianism, evolution was successful due to factors far outside its scientific credibility. And like Keynesianism, evolution will eventually fade away as growing scientific knowledge renders that credibility increasingly implausible. Even if you’re a die-hard believer in the theory of evolution by natural selection, consider this: What other scientific theory has studies continuously performed in order to support it rather than making use of it.

While the woman who wrote this article doesn’t appear to understand either biology or the meaning of the term “cougar”, she does offer a perfectly reasonable explanation why busy, middle-aged professional women find it so difficult to develop relationships with men. Because, as a general rule, it really helps a whole bunch if you’re not attracted to flamingly gay young ones:

I can’t stop thinking about him. And neither can any of my cougar-aged friends. We love Adam, truly, madly, deeply, in a kind of weirdly Mrs. Robinson sexual way. And the reason doesn’t just have to do with our past lives as professional groupies. It also has something to do with biology.

I should be very interested to read an evolutionary fairy talestable strategy explaining the biological rationale for older women to be attracted to young men with no desire to mate with them… for all my doubts about psychology, I suspect it is may be the more relevant pseudoscience here. The only thing biological about it is that these women are fantasizing about substituting platonic relationships for erotic ones, so it’s not weirdly Mrs. Robinson sexual, it’s not sexual at all. They’re just frigid biddies who don’t realize it yet.

On a side note, it also highlights why no sane straight man should harbor any interest in pursuing any sort of relationship, no matter how brief, with these cougarscatladies-in-waiting.

If a revenue production officer can’t handle a 72-year old granny without a weapon of any kind, he should be fired on the spot. As this moronic RPO should be, as well as prosecuted for assault:

Watch Travis County constable Richard McCain explain the incident, and the whole thing sounds reasonable: The driver was speeding through a construction zone, and disobeyed the deputy’s orders when she got pulled over. So, eventually, the cop zapped her with a Taser. But then you watch the video of what went down on that strip of Texas highway. And suddenly, the claims of the driver “refusing to move” and getting “violent” suddenly seem ridiculous. Because the driver is a 72 year-old great grandmother who barely makes it up to the cop’s chest.

Remember, this all stems from the revenue production officer’s “duty” to pull the old woman over for driving too fast. Pursuant to yesterday’s post, it’s worth pointing out the way in which the approved use of tasers by the police has been rapidly defined in a more expansive manner over the last decade. This is precisely what one should logically expect of the use of waterboarding if the Federal government is successful in its attempt to expand its legally approved methods of inquiry.

When I see things like this, I have to admit that I feel a glimmer of hope for the human race. Do you want to know why God created Man? Because zebras and chimpanzees don’t do things like this. Umberto Eco is wrong. God laughs, and most of the time, He’s laughing at the infinite lunacies of Man.